The first writer seems to think it's okay for climate scientists to alter past temperature data and anyone who disagrees is the zombie spawn of Fox News. Something like that. The second seems keen to bash any idea that climate orthodoxy has a few skeletons in the closet.

Whatever one thinks of these two items, neither addresses the core CAGW issue which has become too simple for prevarication. The climate itself settled the matter a few years ago when it failed to warm as predicted. Nobody has the faintest idea where global temperatures are going nor why. Not even next month's temperatures. At this stage it's all guesswork and chutzpah.

So the passion in these pieces cannot arise from genuine concern about catastrophic global warming because it isn’t warming - let alone
catastrophically. So what is it all about? Why do people still express themselves
in such extreme ways? I do too by the way – from my side of the fence. More often than I’d like anyhow.

To my mind the CAGW debate is wholly political which is where the passion comes from. It’s about
the global demise of the middle classes, their increasing irrelevance as a
powerful social class and their demotion to worker-consumers just like everyone else but the elite.

It’s about the prospect of having to compete globally for
such basics as energy, raw materials and food. About the possibility
that these necessities could become scarce if developing countries consume them with the same profligacy as we still do. Or if they are better able to afford them - and isn't that something to think about?

Certainly when I read blogs, newspaper items and comments on
climate change, CAGW proponents tend to use language which does not tie in with what the climate is actually doing. Or rather what it isn't doing. I rarely detect genuine concern about global
temperatures.

It’s almost always about bashing sceptics or it's about consumption. CO2 emissions are used as a symbol for consumption - they always have been. The Guardian has wittered away about consumption since I first started reading it fifty years ago – probably longer.
It’s not a new refrain. If I remember rightly, PVC should have run out by now,
but that’s another story.

Sceptics can be similarly extreme, but I think that may be
for different reasons. Or it may not – hard to tell amid the unlovely fog of passion.

To my mind the flaky CAGW science deflects our attention from the
real problem which appears to be this deep-rooted anxiety about the future –
which I’ll admit to sharing. I don’t want my central heating switched off in
winter and I don’t want a world of two monolithic social classes - Them and Us.

The future seems threatening as ordinary middle class people
lose whatever political power they once had – even the power to be a social
class. So perhaps we would be better off framing the debate in terms of anxiety about
the future, accepting that such anxieties cannot always be rigidly rational and
scientifically valid.

Perhaps we should also accept that widespread and
essentially political anxieties ought to be brought out into the open rather
than hidden behind environmental rhetoric and unattractive aggression or simulated and equally unattractive condescension.

As a CAGW sceptic, that’s a debate I would find easy enough
to join and maybe find common ground with those who are anxious about political
power, natural resources and willing to frame arguments in these terms rather
than pretending to understand the climate, or pretending to know that others
understand it.

If we humanise the debate in this way, if we take account of
the emotional aspects and admit that it is perfectly reasonable to be anxious
about our political future, such as the possibility that we might not have a
political future, then maybe we’d get somewhere.

2 comments:

Excellent point. I have often suspected that concerns about the environment are driven by the old middle-class anxieties about frugality and a proper moderate stewardship of resources. It is only those showy heedless spendthrifts who endanger the rest of us decent people with their lack of concern. Do you remember when Mrs. Thatcher was keen on defeating global warming?